Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 338.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2023-12-08 05:42:20+00:00
        From: Chris Chesher <chris.chesher@sydney.edu.au>
        Subject: New Book: Invocational media: Reconceptualising the computer

New book:
Invocational media: reconceptualising the computer
Chris Chesher
Bloomsbury Academic
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/invocational-media-9781501363627/>

Invocational Media critiques the sociotechnical power of digital
technologies by introducing the concept of invocational media.

What is an invocation? Ask your voice assistant and it will define it
for you. It is a media artefact that responds to many invocations such
as seeking the weather forecast, requesting any song you can name, or
turning on the lights, almost magically. This contemporary manifestation
of the ancient practice of invocation gives an immediate response to
your call in a way that Chris Chesher argues is the characteristic power
of all computers, which he redefines as invocational media.

This book challenges the foundations of computer science by offering
invocation as a powerful new way of conceptualising digital
technologies. Drawing on media philosophy, Deleuze, Guattari, Heidegger,
Latour, Austin, Innis and McLuhan, it critiques the representationalism
of data processing, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
Invocational media seem to empower individuals, but necessarily subject
users to corporate and government monopolies of invocation. They offer
many 'solutions', but only by reducing everything to the same kind of
act. They complicate agency in their indifference as to whether invokers
are human or non-human. With robotics they invoke material form to act
physically and autonomously. People willingly make themselves invocable
to surveillance and control by creating their own profiles and marking
themselves with biometrics. This ground-breaking book will change how
you think about digital media by showing they are, in fact, invocational
media.

Turning away from computational media as "digital" and instead
theorizing computers through their capacity to invoke, to call things up
and respond, Chris Chesher's Invocational Media provides a staggeringly
original perspective on technology that thrillingly reimagines almost
all foundations of digital culture.
― Grant Bollmer, Associate Professor of Media Studies, NC State
University, USA

In a time where we are all mesmerized by the magic of ChatGPT and
similar AI technologies, Chris Chesher's book is highly welcomed and
timely. Using the concept of invocation and engaging with a wide range
of relevant media philosophy, Invocational Media offers an interesting
and highly original way to theorize how we design, experience and
interact with digital technologies and, more precisely, how they design
us. This is an important contribution to the philosophy of media and
compulsory reading for everyone puzzled by the mystery of contemporary AI.
― Mark Coeckelbergh, Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at
the University of Vienna, Austria

Just at the moment when the interactive interface is newly ascendant and
we thought that all had been said, along comes this gift of a book.
Thinking with the generative trope of invocational media, Chesher
refigures the power and limits of computation. Invocational Media offers
a history of the present of human-computer interaction, and a proposal
for how we can rearticulate its future. It will be of interest to anyone
engaged with the invocations, avocations and evocations that comprise
relations at and through the interface.
― Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK



--
DR CHRIS CHESHER | Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures
Degree Director Digital Communication and Culture
Department of Media and Communications
School of Literature, Art, and Media | Faculty of Arts
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

Recent publications:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/invocational-media-9781501363627/
The emergence of autolography: the ‘magical’ invocation of images from
text through AI
https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X231193252



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